Nutrition Series (Pt. 3) — Why Do We Need Dietary Fat?
Nutrition Series (Pt. 3) — Why Do We Need Dietary Fat?
Are Omega-3s all they are cracked up to be?
Embarking on this nutrition series journey has proved far more daunting than I initially intended — the major reason for the delayed posting these past few weeks, in addition to severe imposter syndrome setting in. Yet, despite my previous lack of comprehension, this endeavor has entirely changed or enhanced my understanding and approach to different elements of nutrition. Hopefully, it has done similarly for you.
In preparation for this edition and studying fatty acids, I quickly realized how little I knew. There were several important factors I got wrong in my article, Strong Opinions Weakly Held, which I have corrected both in this article and that one. Furthermore, I used to think of fats as extremely binary: Saturated fats, bad; unsaturated fats, good. In reality, it’s a lot more of what Donna says about comparing diets to economic theories in the West Wing:
“It’s like with diets. How there are all these different diet theories all completely contradictory, when most doctors agree that the healthiest advice is just to eat a variety of foods in moderate amounts.”
As you read on, consider: What does your current consumption of dietary fat — the amount of calories you consume that come from fat — look like? How much saturated fat do you consume? How much monounsaturated fat? And how much polyunsaturated fat?
Worth Listening To
Both of these episodes are excellent. Dr. Attia and Dr. Patrick ask very different questions, and together, they brilliantly articulate the importance of Omega-3s and other fatty acids.
For reference, Dr. Bill Harris’ research is one of the key reasons we know as much about Omega-3 fatty acids as we do.
The Show Notes from “The Drive” episode are exceptional if you’d like to explore the fatty acid rabbit hole.
Conversations With a Personal Trainer
This particular conversation took place last Tuesday, April 2nd, with a client I’ve known for over two decades. When I was in middle school, he was a mentor to me as Lake Harriet’s assistant chess coach. I’m not sure why it took me this long to ask, but I asked why he loves chess so much. In short, it became his refuge as a kid and still remains so. To this day, he is still heavily influential in the Minnesota chess world.
It was incredibly insightful on his part. And an idea sparked: I’d venture to guess many of you have a similar activity in which you find refuge. Chess certainly was for me, too. More recently, it’s been strength training. But they both have something in common in that they fit my introverted preference for the solitude of my own thoughts.
What do you find refuge in as an adult? When you need to escape from the world for a brief time, what helps you?
Fatty Acids — Why Are They So Damn Important?
For years, I used to pour olive oil on everything—extra virgin, cold-pressed, organic olive oil. I would use it for cooking and include it in my breakfast and dinner. Why? Monounsaturated fat. A common mistake I made was equating monounsaturated fats with omega-3 fatty acids. Monounsaturated fat— the fat we find in olive oil and various other foods — is an Omega-9 fatty acid known as Oleic acid.
While Oleic acid provides necessary health benefits and will be a key component of this piece, I wasn’t consuming the nutrients I thought I was. And while olive oil contains some Omega-3 fatty acids, the amount is very small. Moreover, the Omega-3 in question is mostly comprised of Alpha-Linolenic Acid (ALA), which, while necessary, is again not what I was after.
What was I looking for? Eicosapentaenoic acid and Docosahexaenoic acid, or as we commonly know them, are EPA and DHA. These fats are incredibly hard to come by in our food sources. The only natural foods containing high levels of both are seafood, especially fish. The reason is that one species in particular synthesizes EPA and DHA: microalgae. What eats the microalgae? Fish.
As an aside, if you eat meat and/or seafood, the food that animal ate matters, as Robert Lustig pointed out in his discussion with Andrew Huberman:
“Let’s talk about steak. We love our marbling. You can cut our US Grade A steak with a butter knife… It turns out that marbling is intromyocellular lipid. That animal has metabolic syndrome. The American, corn-fed animal. Because that corn is filled with branch-chain amino acids. That’s what’s in protein powder. If you’re building muscle, that’s ok. You have a place to put them. But if you’re not, you consume those excess amino acids, they’re going to go to the liver, they’re going to be deaminated, and they’re going to end up as branch chain organic acids. They’re going to flood the mitochondria. The mitochondria aren’t going to be able to deal with the volume. So they’re going to divert the excess and turn that into fat. So now you’ve got triglyceridemia and chance for fatty liver disease and inuslin resistance. What kind of meat you eat has a lot to do with your metabolic health.
Why do I mention EPA and DHA? Let’s go back to what fatty acids are and their importance to our vitality. Fatty acids make up the membrane of every cell in our body. They determine what gets into a cell and what goes out. Here’s an example from Bill Harris’ conversation with Peter Attia on how certain fats, like oleic acid from above, help reduce our LDL cholesterol:
“When you take in the omega-6s or the omega-9s, you replace some of the saturated fat in your cell membranes. When you consume less saturated fat, you’re reducing, to an extent, the amount of saturated fat in your membranes and that has an effect on the physical, chemical fluidity of the membrane.
There is, buried within all of our cell membranes, hundreds and thousands of these receptors, proteins, that are sitting right in the middle of membranes. One of these is called the LDL receptor — low-density lipoprotein. Which is the primary lipid particle that carries cholesterol in our blood. And that receptor is sitting there in the liver membrane. And if you remove saturated fat, or lower the amount of saturated fat, it changes the properties of the membrane. So that LDL receptor is more efficient at removing LDL particles from the blood. That essentially lowers your cholesterol level…
It’s the LDL that’s effected by the saturation of fats.
Fatty acids also play vital roles as an energy source (the mitochondria in our cells are how our body metabolizes fat for energy), are necessary for the absorption of certain vitamins (fat-soluble vitamins like vitamin D), and certain fats, such as omega-3s, are crucial to metabolizing and reducing triglycerides — high triglycerides (hypertriglyceridemia) is a leading cause of high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, hardening of the arteries, and contribute to metabolic syndrome.
So, we have this extremely complex and multifunctional nutrient. More confusingly, there are many different types to keep track of in our diet. Omega-3s (EPA and DHA, in particular) are such an important subject because they are so hard to acquire in our diet. The average American diet includes 150mg of combined EPA and DHA, compared to 80-100 grams of total fat consumed. That’s roughly 0.16% of our dietary fat from EPA and DHA.
This is a big part of what I got wrong in my former nutrition model. I incorrectly assumed EPA and DHA were superior to the other fatty acids. In reality, each fatty acid is equally important to our overall health. But because we consume so little of these two, they get far more attention. Fish oil supplements, for example, are sold at just about every grocery store in America and generated $2.29 billion in revenue in 2022.
What are these different fatty acids, and why are they so important to include in our diet? Below is a list of each family of dietary fatty acids, what they do, and where we can find them in our food.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids: Polyunsaturated Fats
ALA is an Essential fatty acid, meaning our body cannot produce it on its own and needs to consume it through the diet.
Benefit: Reducing triglycerides and overall cholesterol. A reduced risk in all-cause mortality.
Found in: Nuts, seeds, oils, plants (especially prominent in chia and flax seeds.)
It’s worth noting our body does convert some ALA into EPA and then DHA, but the amount is insignificant.
EPA
Benefit: Reduces blood pressure, triglycerides, and risk of coronary heart disease. Is also anti-inflammatory and has been shown to reduce symptoms of depression. In women with menopause, it also reduces the frequency of hot flashes.
Found in: Cold-water fish, krill, algae
DHA
Benefit: DHA is a prominent component of the brain, specifically found in our brain’s gray matter, and is vital for cognitive function. It also helps improve cardiovascular health and is an anti-inflammatory.
Found in: Cold-water fish, krill, algae
Omega-6 Fatty Acids: Polyunsaturated Fats
Linoleic Acid (LA) — An essential fatty acid, LA is considered by many to be unhealthy and a contributor to inflammation and heart disease. However, a counterargument is that this is because our diet is simply much too high in LA. In moderate amounts, it does the opposite.
Benefit: Important for cognitive development and heart health.
Found in: Nuts, nut oils, vegetable oils, seeds, and seed oils
Arachidonic Acid (AA) — Last week, I briefly mentioned prostaglandins. AA is responsible for the creation of prostaglandins. Too much AA can increase inflammation, but on the whole, they are necessary for our immune system and fighting infections.
Benefit: Pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory in relation to pain management and our immune system
Found in: Fish, meat, and eggs
Omega-9 Fatty Acids: Monounsaturated Fats
Oleic Acid
Benefit: Reducing total cholesterol, improving heart function, anti-inflammatory
Found in: Especially prominent in olive oil as well as nuts.
Saturated Fatty Acids
Saturated fats are the fat we should be especially cautious about consuming in large quantities. Too much saturated fat has a far greater impact on raising LDL cholesterol than eating dietary cholesterol. However, consuming small amounts of saturated fat is beneficial to the health of our brain and heart.
Found in: Animal products as well as oils and butters.
Trans Fatty Acids
Trans fats are the most dangerous fat for our body. They pose almost no benefit and significantly contribute to heart disease, increased LDL cholesterol, and insulin resistance.
The real danger lies in the fact that trans fats are in almost all of our highly processed foods. Industrially processed oil manufacturers, for example, often add a hydrogen atom to the oil to preserve it, which creates trans fats in the otherwise healthy oil. Hydrogenated vegetable oil became an industry favorite for many of our favorite snack foods.
How to spot trans fats: If you read a label that says “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated,” that product has trans fats in it, even if the label says otherwise.
Trans fats can also be created by heating unsaturated fats at too high of temperatures. For example, sunflower oil is inherently healthy. But because it’s largely comprised of polyunsaturated fats, it oxidizes very quickly when heated, creating these trans fats.
Trans fats are found in almost no natural foods, with the exception of trace amounts in dairy products.
Why Does This Matter?
What are we supposed to do with this information? How should we alter our fat consumption to optimize our health? The single most staggering fact that stood out to during my studying was the staggeringly low amount of EPA and DHA (as I mentioned above, just 0.16% of our overall fat consumption) in our diets. According to this review, that number should be 650mg of combined EPA and DHA per day, at a minimum. And that number is substantially higher if you have metabolic dysfunction such as diabetes, high triglycerides, or high cholesterol — closer to four grams per day.
Additionally, two variables remain: How much fat should we consume each day? And the choices we make in selecting which fatty foods we consume. How much we consume is largely dependent on our total caloric intake and the percentage of calories from fat.
Application
Here’s how you can determine how much fat you should consume:
I always recommend starting with protein first. As we discussed in Part 1 of this series, your protein intake should range between 1.5 and 1.7 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. If you’re 200 pounds, that’s about 145 grams per day, or 580 calories (145 x 4).
Second, determine your resting metabolic rate (RMR) — how many calories your body burns each day while at rest. The most accurate way to do this is through a resting metabolic assessment, though it can also be determined through in-body scales. Let’s assume your RMR is 1,600 calories/day.
We then come to a fork in the road: If your goal is to lose weight and improve body composition (higher muscle-to-fat ratio), your caloric intake should hover close to or slightly above your RMR. If your goal is to maintain or gain weight, your caloric intake should be significantly greater than your RMR.
Let’s assume this same 200lb individual wants to lose weight and their caloric intake recommendation is 1,700 calories per day.
580 is from protein, or 34%.
This person is in relatively poor physical shape, so their fat intake will be higher — Usually, between 35-40% of your caloric intake will come from fat in this case. That would put their fat intake between 66 and 76 grams, or 595 and 680 calories worth of fat.
Where should that fat come from? The bulk of it ideally should come from monounsaturated fat. Of the 66-76 grams, roughly 40-50% of it should be monounsaturated. At the low end, that would be about 26 grams; at the high end, about 38 grams. Another 30-40% should come from polyunsaturated fat, broken up between omega-6s and omega-3s.
I will note that the conversation between Attia and Harris got interesting on the topic of omega-6s. Attia argued that because we ate very little of them historically, we don’t need much today. Harris says omega-6s are fine, and we should focus solely on increasing our omega-3 intake.
My conclusion is they are likely both right. With that in mind, let’s split the 30-40% of polyunsaturated fats evenly between omega-3s and omega-6s (15-20% each). That would put each one at 10-15 grams.
Saturated fat should be approximately 10-20% of total fat intake, putting it at 7-15 grams. For context, a 6oz steak has about 10 grams of saturated fat.
Influencing Behavior
In the two weeks it’s taken me to write this article, I have already altered my behavior in a number of ways:
I’ve doubled my Omega-3 supplementation — I now take one serving of each of these two supplements each day:
Nordic Naturals — 1,100mg of EPA and DHA
Kori Krill Oil — 800mg of krill oil; 140mg of EPA and DHA
Salmon is becoming more of a staple in my household this year — our goal is to have it at least once a week.
I keep my Saturated fat intake very low at less than 10% of my overall fat intake each day. That comes to about 10-12 grams each day.
Because of the prevalence of hydrogenated oils in packaged food, I eat almost no highly processed foods on a regular basis.
Lastly, I’m no longer nearly as concerned about cooking with olive oil since its large amounts of antioxidants stabilize it at higher temperatures. However, because of its high calories, I sadly no longer pour it on everything.
How will this information influence your own behavior?
If you would like to learn your specific Resting Metabolic Rate, you can learn more about our metabolic testing services at Envision Fitness by going to our website.
Other Learning This Week
I Receive a Letter from a High School Student — Ted Gioia
The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College — Ted Gioia
Are smartphones harmful to youth mental health? Experts torn on Jonathan Haidt’s book — NBC News
The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust - Derek Thompson
The [almost] unbelievable effects of a high maximal aerobic capacity on all-cause mortality - Peter Attia